Damage nucleation phenomena: Statistics of times to failure

TL;DR

This paper explores the statistical behavior of an annealed damage model, revealing how a tuning parameter influences whether the system mimics classical nucleation or exhibits unique damage-related phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces a damage model with a tunable parameter that can replicate classical nucleation behavior or display distinct damage-specific statistical characteristics.

Findings

Model behavior varies with the tuning parameter.

The model can replicate classical nucleation statistics.

Distinct damage phenomena emerge under certain parameters.

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the statistical behavior of an annealed continuous damage model. For different model variations we study distributions of times to failure and compare these results with the classical case of metastable nucleation in statistical mechanics. We show that our model has a tuning parameter which significantly determines the model behavior. Depending on the values of this tuning parameter, our model exhibits statistical behavior either similar to nucleation of systems in statistical mechanics or an absolutely different type of behavior intrinsic only for systems with damage. This lets us investigate the possible similarities and differences between damage phenomena and classical phenomena of nucleation in statistical mechanics.